Point-of-sale (POS) systems allow users, such as merchants, to offer customers flexibility in completing goods or services sales transactions. However, such systems may not provide a mechanism for secure transactions such as entering a PIN (personal identification number) associated with a credit, debit, EMV, and other payment cards, including cards having embedded integrated circuits for, among other things, authentication. The relative lack of security may lead to identity theft or fraudulent transactions, and ultimately a relatively poor consumer and/or merchant experience.
Point of sale terminals need to have a secure operating environment that guarantee unscrupulous people cannot steal sensitive data or hijack the payment processing capabilities of the device. Unfortunately, this results in POS terminals that are closed systems, and have very limited applications that can be used to customize and augment the terminal functionality. In addition, the terminal needs a dedicated PIN pad that needs to be physically protected to meet strict security requirements and needs physical and logical security to isolate sensitive data from the regular operating environment.